I am highly neurotic but I never thought of that as a mental health issue, just more of a personality trait, as you referenced. Ultimately, I'm trying to address depression, which often lurks under addictive and compulsive behavior which I have exhibited throughout my life in various and sundry ways. And that can be a beast.

I'm glad to hear about your creative writing pursuit. Several writers on these boards; we should start an online writing group or something. You have a great sense of humor, and you have a fun way with words and scenarios. I find most of your posts here slightly offensive and highly hilarious. It's a good mix!! It seems like a natural pursuit for you--I hope you let me read your project when you're ready.

I'm thinking about giving up Facebook as well. I'm not so concerned about the privacy stuff--who really has privacy in 2018?--but it's a time suck for me. I have all these things I want to do, other things I have to do... and I look at the time I spend reading stupid crap on facebook about people I haven't seen in years and wouldn't care much about except for facebook... I'm starting to try to let it go i have so many people on "ignore" on FB at this point I don't see much anyway.

Mental health--well--I wish you well with that. What is mental health, really? At least I wonder for myself. I think most people are fucked up in some way or another--it's just learning to deal with it. i've suspended my own monthly therapy sessions--it was good for a place to "vent" but other than that, I wasn't seeing much point to it. Or maybe I'm just feeling better about things lately, which is cool, too. Anyway--good job in being proactive with the depression. I wasn't for years and discovered it catches up with you eventually if you don't deal with it.

Over the years, I was curious as to what happened to a friend of mine who I hadn't seen since the late 1990's. I would google him and find no info. For some reason, I tried again two weeks ago and a newspaper article pops up. It was written by a family member who is now a journalist. It told the story of how my friend died of a heroin overdose within a year of the last time I saw him. So this whole time I've been wondering about him, he's been dead. How he died was not surprising. I knew his issues. But the fact that my decades old curiosity of "Where was he, what he was doing" would have been answered in a tombstone the whole time, was shocking. And upsetting. I wept, albeit slightly.

I've been trying to figure out what to do with such information. "Live life to its fullest." "Live each day like its your last." "Cherish each moment." I honestly don't know how one does that. Obligations and the burden of living are never escaped. If anything, it really just reinforces one's complete ignorance of things. I think that's what I felt most. Like a foolishness, a reminder of my arrogance in trying to attempt to know. And it wasn't just the passing of time, it was the misappropriation of mind. Somewhere, he was a counter-narrative but to find out that it was "He's dead, I'm alive" was not what I expected.

It has moved me to work harder on something I've been avoiding. If one has an inclination, to do something, there really is no use in waiting. I have no delusion that I could have helped him. But if I could speak to him at the moment he decided to leave his half way house in order to score heroin, I would have told him to think about his ultimate insignificance before doing so. What we wanted, who we thought we were at that time was simply way out of proportion of who we actually were. His brother called him a "talented songwriter." Well based on the fact that not once in my life did I ever receive a royalty check, it simply was not true.

On a brighter note, I got great reviews at my dental examination. Home care has paid off. I am up to 60 albeit slightly disorganized pages on my writing project. And when I responded with "Death" to my physician's question of "What concerned me" he said "Anything else" which I took as a good sign.

That's tragic. I also get curious about past friends. Hard not to compare but it makes me happy to not have a facebook. The important ones, I've kept in touch with most of them.

I had a childhood friend die from speedballing (shooting ice melted into h) at 22. Mom found him foaming at the mouth on his bed.

His father was really shooken up losing his only child. Both were sweet. I later found out h overdoses are very preventable if there's less stigma with h and somebody can sit them and have some narcan handy in case they start to see mouth foaming.

I don't see there being some way to magically shift everything based on that. Everyone is doing the best with what they got. Trying to improve life how they know best. It does make me grateful that medical greens were the only drug that consistently caught my attention.

The story was framed within the context of Narcan. The writer wondered if his brother would still be alive if Narcan was around then. He was somewhat of a pioneer. He had substance issues but hurt his neck, was prescribed opiates, and eventually found heroin.
You are right. There is really no big message to take out of a story like that it except some guy I knew died way too early but too surprisingly. I guess I would like one but its not there.

(1) Despite severe market fluctuations and having to pay our creepy Uncle Sam, we are still 400k+. So that's something to be thankful for.
(2) Finished first chapter of "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" by Marie Kondo and began process. She suggests tidying by category not rooms, so I started with "paper." I am going through all pieces of paper and asking "Do I need this piece of paper." Have eliminated much based on redundancy as it is also available in electronic form. She is very helpful but I pray to God I never meet her in real life because she's absolutely insufferable. Ok, you are tidy. Get over yourself. And naming a process after yourself? Think I'll write "The Life-Changing Magic of Being a Complete Fucking Douchebag" and call it the Sonja process or some bullshit. I'll hold seminars and make personal visitations. I'll be so effective in teaching people how to be douchebags that I too will have no repeat clientele because I am such a good teacher. I will tell people that one cannot incrementally become a complete fucking douchebag but must do it one complete swoop otherwise they will rebound into being a non-douchebag. I will tell them that I have been interested in being a complete fucking douchebag for as long as I can remember and it is my life dream that others can be one as well. Hopefully we will hold seminars in the same places and I can tell my followers to cut up her book into tiny little pieces and throw them at her like confetti and she will have a complete breakdown at which point she can spend the rest of her life frustrated that there is nothing to tidy up in her rubber room and I can bring my followers to see her and we can laugh at her like the complete fucking douchebags we are;
(3) Dental/Physical Health/Mental Health - I have recently found people I am happy in all three areas and am starting programs in each. Synergistic discipline so to speak. Plus they all agree I need work in all three areas, especially the mental health. I am looking into changing through cognitive work which is very difficult but I actually think it can be done despite what I just wrote in #2;
(4) Due to aggressive home payments in first two years off of re-fi, we are in position to turn 30 year into 10 year.
(5) Average book reading staying steady at four per month;
(6) Writing project comes in spurts due to other areas of consideration;
(7) I think that's it;

Four books per month?
You are a better man than I am.
My average is about 6 books per year, mostly on vacation time, and I wantch almost zero TV.

Now that I think of it I do read a ton though, but mostly articles/papers about boring stuff I like (money, stock market, macroeconomics, etc).
Maybe I should just think in terms of "pages read" instead of "number of books"

I had no idea what I was sitting on. I just assumed I needed all these documents. I think I'm on at least my tenth 30 gallon bag of shredded material. Old paper absorbs and the air quality in the room has actually improved. I realized that I don't need a filing cabinet filled with 100 of folders in 100 folders. I have improved the filing system to a point where I think all I need is a little box to keep essential documents. I wont go as far to say that I am a hoarder but I now have to admit I have hoarder qualities and this is becoming an emancipating experience. I have to say, there is some magic at work here. Oh, man. I can't believe I just wrote that. I should stick my ballsack in the shredder for saying stupid shit like that.

This Japanese lady is onto something. Now I kind of feel bad for wanting to cause her a nervous breakdown. I think what is misleading is the her employment of "tidy." She means something way more serious than the normal interpretation of tidy. It's not a straightening things up, or putting things in order type of endeavor but a radical overhaul. Most important advice so far: tidy by topic, not room. We are still on paper. She gives six months for the entire tidying process. I think we will need it. I practically filled up our communal dumpster with shredded paper over the past few days.

Similar to Kubler-Ross she has five basic categories one has to address when tidying. One always has to be available/ready to engage in this kind of process and I'm going at it like nobody's business for some reason. But it really feels like a lifting of a burden. That there was an invisible but real presence that's being removed from the house.

You're starting to internalize all the pollyana Youtube star's minimalism ramblings. It turns out that getting rid of shit feels as good as getting out of debt.

As you progress you'll start to get better and better at using "not my circus not my monkeys" to everything else. Some day you might not even have to be a douche anymore, you've simply rid your existence of all those people that need some douching. It's fuggin' magic!

Is your wife on board with your decluttering spree? My GF is NOT on-board with the whole minimalism thing. I'm seriously starting to get on her nerves because we are now so far apart when it comes to stuff, so there is a definite line to the decluttering business. You can think of it as Wheaton levels. Kondo does actually move people 1.5-2 steps up the tidyness Wheaton scale and she does it FAST! Especially because her approach is not JUST about your stuff, but about you as a person, which is radically different from any other tidying approach I've ever come by (if you ignore Buddhism in this regard...). Not only do you transform your home, but you might also transform your feelings about your home, and this really is a lot of gain compared to the effort. It makes it difficult for those of us who wholly embrace decluttering to communicate with 'those who still think they might need this thing some day even though it hasn't been used for three years'...